Monday, 29 April 2013

What should be done to tackle the UK’s high re-offending rate?

Re-offending is a costly problem to the current government;
it can also impose long-term harm on the victimised individuals and communities, the offenders themselves and their families. Almost half of those released from prison are
re-convicted within a year, a rate which has remained this high for a decade.[1] Over half of all re-offenses were committed
by those with 11 or more previous convictions. The UK’s
prison population stands at over 85,000 – a figure which has doubled over the
past 20 years. The economic costs are
enormous; re-offending accounts for between £9.5bn and £13bn of the overall
cost of crime to UK society of £64bn per year.[2]

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling is addressing the urgency
of the problem by both toughening penalties and implementing reforms to
rehabilitation, utilising various community organisations who are pursuing mentoring
and innovative rehabilitation methods.
These government reforms will allow lower-risk offenders to be
supervised by private firms and charities on a payment by results basis, while
prisoners serving sentences of less than 12 months will be forced to undertake a
period of rehabilitation upon release for the first time. These policy prescriptions have come about
from an analysis of the reasons for and circumstances in which re-offending occurs,
including ex-prisoner homelessness and unemployment. There is growing agreement from all points
on the political spectrum that prevention is preferable to tougher sentencing as a means of promoting better economic, social and personal outcomes.

The key to tackling the re-offending cycle is to provide
prison-leavers with better options which lead to long-term personal
sufficiency, both economic and psychological.
It’s imperative to assist people leaving prison in the areas of employability skills, job search and placement, and housing.
How these services are delivered can come from a variety of sources
including local government programmes, charities and social
enterprises. The government has made
it clear that the criminal justice system has been opened up to more
providers and that they are to be paid by results for their effectiveness

Current programme providers, both in the UK and elsewhere, are
pioneering new approaches to rehabilitation; these represent a bank of trials
as a means of testing whether particular re-offending prevention programmes work. Those conducting such trials need to have
adequate data on re-offending to verify the effectiveness of their work. The Ministry of Justice’s recently launched
Justice Data Lab (suggested and supported by New
Philanthropy Capital) will allow organisations working with offenders to
better understand the tangible impact their work is having on re-offending
rates so that they can see what works and what doesn’t. This will enable them to demonstrate
their impact to commissioners and allow them to fine-tune their services. In the past, charities had to depend on
their relationships with local police forces, prisons and probation trusts for
information on re-offending. The Data L:ab will enable the promotion of quantitative measures to demonstrate
effectiveness. Improved commissioning
could also reduce costs and deliver improved value for money for the
government.

There has been an analogous move in the field of development toward greater involvement of local stakeholders using programmes as trials. The economist Tim Harford is a champion of
this evidence-based support for policy. I think his thoughts on this subject are an appropriate approach to the problem of re-offending:

“…let’s hear it for pragmatism:
for trusting evidence rather than theory; for looking at the specifics of the
situation rather than some overarching narrative; for preferring what works to
what fits our preconceptions; and for being willing to test our ideas and
change direction as is necessary.”[3]

There is a plethora of rehabilitation initiatives
being tested in the communities of the UK; their outcomes will yield up which ones work
most effectively.